[imagesource: Wikivoyage]

Reintroducing mammoths to Alaska or dodos to Mauritius sounds silly.

Yet, a biotechnology startup is promising to resurrect these vanished animals.

In March the startup said it would bring back the woolly mammoth, and in August it added a pledge to give the Tasmanian tiger, or the thylacine, which was declared extinct in the 1930s, a new lease on life.

Now Colossal Biosciences is adding the stereotypically dumb, flightless bird, the dodo, which was killed by predators in Mauritius in the 1600s, to their de-extinction to-do list.

Colossal has been drawing in so much support from investors, many of whom are celebrities barely able to understand the science, and is now well on its way to having a valuation of over $1 billion.

Bloomberg notes that there is significant scepticism from paleo-geneticists and other experts who worry that the effects of de-extinction would be unpredictable.

Yet Colossal is blowing up, gathering another $150 million for a total of $225 million since 2021, allowing the startup to be valued at a total of about $1,5 billion:

For some investors, a live dodo is less important than the scientific breakthroughs generated in the push to de-extinction. “Along the lines of being able to bring a species back, we’re going to learn things we can’t learn in a wet lab,” said Thomas Tull, a tech investor who produced the movie Jurassic World and made money investing in scrubs company Figs. His United States Innovative Technology Fund led the latest round. “When you’re doing big things like this, who knows what you’re going to discover along the way.”

Jim Breyer, an early backer of Facebook who invests in Colossal through his firm Breyer Capital said that Colossal are “solving complex problems” adding that “Long-term, there will be significant revenue opportunities around sustainability, conservation, and re-wilding.”

The biodiversity crisis is inspiring people to think about the future of animal extinction, and I guess, if Colossal can get this right, we might not need to worry about never seeing the rhino, tiger or humpback whale again.

Colossal is positioning itself as a solution to the damage done to the natural world and co-founder Ben Lamm says we have the opportunity to reverse human-inflicted biodiversity loss.

In terms of the payoff for investors, well, it’s all in the long game:

Company insiders regularly bring up the space race when discussing the company’s prospects as an example of a seemingly-impossible goal that was not only eventually reached but also generated collateral inventions that we still use today.  “What’s nice about these extinct species is they are systems problems,” said Lamm in an interview. Solving a systems problem requires innovation in multiple areas — and therefore creates breakthroughs that can lead to more spinoffs. “It’s like the moon landing. That was a systems problem.”

Lamm, co-founded Colossal with Harvard University geneticist George Church and has gathered support from investors like Paris Hilton and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, as well as those with more of an aura of scientific seriousness and pedigree.

May the force be with us if they ever decide to bring dinosaurs back.

[source:bloomberg]